I mulled his offer. In truth, I didn’t have much leverage to work with, other than being stubborn. That never got me anywhere with Wallace. Wallace had never even offered me a quid pro quo. The fact Bray was offering anything at all was a welcome change. And he was softly smiling at me, which I had to admit was hard to resist.
“Fine, but like I said: I don’t know anything about kids.”
His smile grew. “Better start reading then,” he said, and handed me the binder.
I glared at him and felt the heft of it like a death sentence between my fingers.
“Plenty of time before movie night tonight.” The smile on his handsome face had only grown, and I wished in that moment for the burly grouch I was used to dealing with.
“You better find out what happened to Wallace,” I said.
“You’ll know as soon as I know.” He began gathering the papers on the dining table as if for distraction and like he didn’t want to talk about it. “I need you prepared for this, Lauren. You’re my only hope for cracking them at this point.”
I flipped open the binder in my hands and skimmed the first page: the bullet-point life history of Lauren Thomas. “Well, then maybe you should have picked someone who knows how to be a nanny.”
He slung his satchel over his shoulder. “Based on your case history, I know you’ll figure it out. You’re the best.”
The compliment landed oddly because Wallace had never said such a thing. He just handed me case after case, each one increasing in difficulty and danger to the point I had to adapt or die. There’d never been praise or any feedback, really. Just the occasionalgood girland maybe an extended stay in a tropical or otherwise vacation-destination-worthy locale as a bit of a treat.
“Thanks,” I said to Bray as I soaked in the knowledge that I apparently had a reputation within the DSA. Or at least in his eyes. His gorgeous gray eyes, which hooked mine every time they met.
“You bet.” He grinned and I felt that spark in my fingertips again. “See you at movie night.”
I went to tell him I’d better not see him there, because it would risk our cover, but he was already making his way toward the door.
Bray left me in peace to wander about my new home. The self-guided tour took all of sixty seconds, seeing the one-bedroom apartment was maybe eight hundred square feet. But it was still very nice. The DSA had to be shelling out a chunk of change for rent, given the location. The bedroom was decorated in soft, earthy tones like the living room. The bathroom had a soaking tub, which I promptly decided I needed to test out.
I sunk into bubbles up to my chin and tried to let New York, the red-eye flight, and the encounters with my new neighbors melt away, but my worry over where Wallace was kept me from fully relaxing. I was exposed without him. As naked and vulnerable as I was sitting in this bathtub. I reached for my phone on the tub’s ledge and decided to look for answers myself.
I pulled upUnknownand sent him a text.
I’m here. Where are you?
Nothing indicated he received the message: no read receipt, no bouncing ellipses. He rarely ignored me.
The place is cute, by the way.
But your stand-in is a little … green.
The thought of Bray made me consider texting him—he had given me his number—but what would I say other than ask him where Wallace was again?
I convinced myself Wallace would respond soon and climbedout of the tub. I settled on my fluffy bed in an equally fluffy robe and flipped through the file Wallace had prepared. If I was going to do this, I needed to be ready.
Lauren Thomas was twenty-five, born in Sacramento, previously employed as a nanny by a family in Marin County, and had a degree in early childhood education.
A pang of resentment always fizzled behind my breastbone whenever Wallace gave me an identity who had gone to college. Other than the handful of classes I had slipped into under the radar on an assignment, I had never had the privilege.
I flipped a few pages to find reference information for my previous employer, someone I was sure was entirely fictional but would answer the phone should anyone call and ask about Lauren Thomas. I assumed it would be “Sue” from some department deep in the bowels of a DSA building somewhere, the same woman who had played the part of my mother, my teacher, and even my parole officer when needed. I had never actually met her, but she faithfully picked up the phone when Wallace deemed it necessary to the case.
Turned out Lauren Thomas used to work for the Van Sant family of Tiburon. She tended to their twin children, Milly and Taylor, from the time they were two until their fifth birthday a month before when the family moved to Amsterdam. Lauren had then been paired with the Browning family through a nanny-finder website and had relocated to the Del Rio neighborhood in the South Bay to begin working with them.
I knew the Brownings simply did notfindLauren Thomas on a website. She’d been planted and their paths purposely crossed by Wallace.
I lay back on the pillows, wondering what someone with a degree in early childhood education knew that I didn’t. Children were little lumps of clay, I knew that much. Easily molded and carved by their surroundings and the adults in their lives.
My own childhood had begun in the warmth of my mother’sembrace. Deep in the hidden layers of my memory lived the quiet murmurs of a hummed lullaby, the scent of skin fresh with soap and powder. A laugh like sunlight on a spring day. The gentle hands that had shaped my early years abruptly turned to a merciless chisel, which gouged away everything soft and supple. As a young teen, my mind had still been pliable enough to be formed into an accomplice.
Father knows best.It was the two of us against the world, he had convinced me, and I had to listen, I had to follow. I had to learn how to pick locks, slit window screens, lie without blinking. To slip my fingers into handbags, pockets. To nimbly strip a wristwatch by simply bumping into someone. He’d weaned me on petty theft: wallets, jewelry, pocket change. Then my body blossomed, and I became useful in a different way. No longer the child no one noticed stealing into the coat closet, but the young woman flirting as a distraction while my father rewired someone’s security cameras, stole their car, or siphoned their offshore bank account.
